Website Maintenance Plans

It can be hard to manage a website when you’re trying to grow your small-to-medium sized business.

Unless you wear a lot of hats and can handle the many aspects of being online today, from blogging to social media, marketing and developing your website, achieving your online business goals requires the help of a professional suited to the needs of your business.

Our Website Maintenance Plans are designed to make your life easier, allowing you to focus on your business – and not your website.

More than just a hands-off approach, we take a vested interest in your business and give you the edge by providing you with valuable insights and support from people who have been doing this for a while!

Read on to learn about what website maintenance involves. Also, check out our Website Maintenance Plan Example to see what this might look like for your business.

Monthly Website Maintenance Packages

Our website maintenance services are grouped into packages that we tailor to your business. Determined by your business objectives, they are carried out on a monthly basis and will be adapted as your business needs change and evolve.

It all begins with looking at where your business is now and where you want your business to be in a month from now, 6 months from now, a year from now, 3 years from now, and so on.

Every business is unique and we want to support your business by providing solutions that suit your needs.

This might take the form of improving the performance and usability of your website by making it easy to use on mobile devices and helping it to load faster. It may include optimizing the structure of your website to perform better in search engines and with your target audience.

It also might include making feature integrations on your site, or helping to improve the amount of time someone spends on your site and how many conversions the website receives.

Ultimately, we will figure out together the best use of our time, money, and energy – in line with your core business objectives – and help guide you in making the best decisions for your online business.

Performance Optimizations

Improving the performance of a website has many benefits including improving the experience of the website for your users. A website that loads slowly or inefficiently (requiring downloading large images) makes for a costly experience for you (costing you potential web traffic) and for your users.

What’s more is that a poor performing website can have a serious impact on your search engine rankings as Google doesn’t want to send its users to websites that are slow, aren’t easy to use, or don’t provide a valuable experience.

We can help improve the performance of your website so that it delivers a valuable web experience to your visitors and helps with your website rankings along the way.

Website Hosting

The quality of your web host also has an effect on the success of your online presence as a cheap web host will take longer to send your website (and its files) to website visitors. By going with a quality web host, you can significantly improve the experience of your website as well its quality on Google.

Usability Improvements (UX)

Similar to how fast the website loads, the ease of use and layout of your website – both on mobile devices and desktop – lend itself to how your website is received by both humans and robots (search engine crawl bots).

By improving the user experience you can promote longer website visits, more engagement, and greater website conversions whether that’s calling a number, filling out a form, or signing up for your mailing list.

We can help you to improve the User Experience of your website so that users are engaging with your business in ways that promote its growth.

Feature Integrations

As your business grows and evolves, you may find you need to develop your website to handle these needs. That often involves adding new website functionality, allowing you or your visitors to do things on your website that previously couldn’t be done.

We can assist you in making these integrations properly and in a way that aligns with your business and lifestyle.

On-Call Web Developer Support

Things don’t always go as planned. This is especially true with computers. Sometimes you spot a bug or error and it’s in times like these that it is invaluable to have a Web Developer or Programmer on your side, ready to help out.

Part of our website maintenance service is having quick and easy access to a Web Specialist who can assist you with your website when things go sideways.

Website Content Updates

Need something added or updated on your website? Not a problem. We’re just a call or email away.

Website Software Updates

Ensuring your website and its software are kept up to date is a fundamental piece to what we do and what keeps your website functioning at its best.

Security Testing and Protection

Website Backups

Stop worrying that your website might be lost due to a malicious attack by implementing regular, scheduled website backups.

All our backups are stored securely and redundant so that it the event of an attack or loss of data, we can restore your website to its original state.

Webmaster Services

Let us take care of the details and the regular website maintenance duties including registering domains, setting up hosting, email accounts, and more.

Our maintenance plans include access to your own Webmaster.

Website Migration

Moving a website requires careful planning and execution. You can trust us to do it right with the least amount of hassle and downtime.

Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing your website for search engines is critical to your success online. Let us help you to optimize your site so you can attract the most relevant visitors and achieve strong rankings in Google.

WordPress Website Maintenance Packages

Due to its size, popularity, and open-source nature, if you have a WordPress website, maintenance and security are especially important in protecting and growing your web presence.

Website Maintenance Plan Example

When we begin working together, we will clarify your business goals and analyze the current status of your website from multiple perspectives including the technical and marketing side. From there, we determine a strategy that will help get you to your business goals.

This strategy is broken down on a monthly basis into an hourly number that is then put towards affecting the appropriate change and desired result.

Example: Suzie’s Flower Boutique

So, for example, Suzie’s Flower Boutique might be struggling to attract enough relevant search traffic to her site. Her website uses WordPress and up to now, she has tried maintaining and developing the website herself, mainly through searching Google for advice, installing free plugins and enlisting the help of a freelance developer and content writer.

She isn’t really a Web Developer but is trying to save money by doing it all herself. Little does she know that attempting to do it all herself and hiring one-off help is costing her more and time than if she simply invested that money in a website maintenance service.

The result is a spaghetti website with code scattered everywhere, a bunch of old or unused plugins that are making the website sluggish, and a collection of pages that aren’t optimized for search or her target audience. All of this affects Suzie’s rankings and marketing efforts by making it harder for search engines to understand what her site is about and connecting her to relevant search users.

Suzy needs help and has decided to give us a call.

Onboarding and Initial Audit

After talking to Suzy about her business and business goals, we determine that Suzy wants to attract more relevant traffic to her online Flower Boutique, which will accept orders online and coordinate delivery across the Pacific Northwest.

Once we have established what the objectives of Suzie’s Flower Boutique are, we begin by performing a comprehensive audit of her website and web presence.

This includes a technical audit including site structure, performance, and usability as well as a content and marketing audit that looks at the content on her website and how that content is presented for humans and search engines.

In this example, we notice that her website is hosted with a bargain hosting company located on the wrong side of the country. The lack of proximity to her target customers and low-quality web host is causing her website to load after many seconds, causing long loads times and a higher than average visitor bounce rate.

We see that many of the plugins she has installed are in fact not doing anything and slowing down her site even more and that she doesn’t have the necessary software in place to handle online ordering and delivery.

After analyzing the structure of her website, we see many areas where her website and content is not properly optimized for search engines and pages that are not adding to the customer buying experience either because they do not address the problem the visitor is trying to solve or does not provide a solution to their problem by giving them a clear call to action or resource to help them.

In addition, we notice she doesn’t have any system in place to do backups of her website in the event that it gets hacked and that there is no security protection in place to keep such an event from happening. Oh boy, does Suzie need help!

Maintenance Plan and Strategy

After we have analyzed the state of Suzie’s web presence from various viewpoints, we’re able to see clearly all the things that are preventing her success as well as giving us the information we need to create a Website Maintenance Plan to help her reach her goals.

As is the nature of developing a website for success, there are some activities that need to be performed up-front – like installing an online booking system – and other activities that need to be done over time and regularly like monitoring website performance and executing a Search Engine Optimization strategy.

Our maintenance plans provide for both scenarios: A percentage of time is given to monitoring the technical aspects of your website, things like checking for crawl errors, broken links, mobile usability issues. These things are planned for and done on a monthly basis, usually requiring 1-2 hours a month.

On the other hand, and in the case of Suzie, our maintenance plan will require a little more time up front to integrate her website with the required ordering system, address her lack of website security and protection, and restore and optimize the performance of her website.

The entire strategy will be given to Suzie in the form of a Maintenance and Development Proposal that breaks down the business and website objectives, what we will do to reach those objectives, how long it will take, and how much it will cost.

Normally, as website issues are discovered in the early stages of working together, the cost of maintenance will be higher in the first few months. Once we have reached certain development milestones, the cost of website maintenance is greatly reduced.

Ongoing Care and Support

Suzy now has a website that loads fast, is easy to use for people on mobile devices, and integrates an ordering software that makes selling her flowers simpler and automated.

We optimized her website to attract visitors ready to purchase from Suzy and improved the content and flow of her website to generate more engagement and ultimately more conversions.

Now, as we’ve put these core elements in place, we will continue to work with Suzy to monitor her website and website traffic and provide her with monthly reports that update her to any new developments such as increased rankings for one of her landing pages, or discovering a hidden opportunity to connect with her visitors.

We give Suzie this information in the form of a Website Health and Optimization report (WHO). Suzie’s happy because her website finally does what she wants it to do, which is to make it easier to sell more of her products and services and give her more freedom to enjoy life.

Website Packages for Small Business

For small businesses, we offer the same array of services and support but designed to suit the needs of your small business.

This may only include basic ongoing support like security protection, website monitoring, and regular backups. And we will be by your side should you need to make updates or additions to your website.

Regardless of scope or requirements, your business will receive the same professional service and guidance to help support your business goals.